Georgia out of last place with scores

Posted: Wednesday, August 30, 2006

ATLANTA - Georgia's average SAT score has pulled out of the cellar where it was tied with South Carolina last year, and now Peach State students rank 46th, thanks to the new writing portion added to the most recent version of the test.

Georgia's average score for the new three-part version of the test put it ahead of Florida, Hawaii, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Comparing only public school students, Georgia comes out even better at 44th place.

However, on the math portion, Georgia high school seniors who took the test last year - public and private - averaged 494, losing 2 points from the senior class the previous year. On the verbal section, now called reading, the average score slipped 1 point to 496. The average writing score in Georgia was 487.

Tuesday's news that Georgia ranked better than it ever has brought with it political shadings, too, in this election year. Gov. Sonny Perdue and state Schools Superintendent Kathy Cox beamed at a morning news conference in the Capitol, partly because both had said they shouldn't be re-elected if they couldn't move the state out of dead last.

"For years, our state was ranked either 49th or 50th on SAT scores," Perdue said. "I guess that was OK in the old Georgia. They were resigned to last place, and nobody thought they could do any better. Well, it doesn't work in the new Georgia, and folks, we're not going back."

"Not going back" draws from a line in a campaign commercial that attempts to tie his gubernatorial challenger, Democratic Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, to the unpopular parts of former Gov. Roy Barnes' administration.

But Taylor's spokesman, Rick Dent, expressed surprise that Perdue would celebrate the fact that Georgia's math and reading scores are worse this year than they were last year.

"Our ranking went up, but our scores went down," said Dent. "This is like Georgia losing a football game and moving up in the polls. Nobody in their right mind would be happy about that."

Perdue merely laughed when asked to respond to Democrats' charges that his tight-fisted education budgets held average scores lower than they would have been. Instead, he observed that the math and reading tests were harder than in past years, as demonstrated by the fact that national scores dropped more than the Georgia scores did. He also pointed to several Republican initiatives that he said had helped the state.

Georgia educators always have been troubled by the fact that so many students take the test, more than go on to college and even more than graduate from high school. To reduce the temptation for curious high-schoolers to take the test even if they aren't prepared for it, Perdue gave educators access to freebies that wouldn't count against the state's ranking.

Among those are sample tests, online courses to prepare students for the test and a free pre-SAT for every 10th-grader. More than 100,000 Georgia students took advantage of the test-prep courses, but still, 58,000 students took the real thing, just a 1,000-student decrease from last year.